“Perhaps the most urgent fear is this: a sense among even those Chinese whose living standards have soared that frantic development has come at too high a price. Never in history have the promise and peril of head-spinning modernization been so apparent within the space of a single lifetime. A country where the authorities call the air in the capital “fine” on days when nearby skyscrapers are completely shrouded from view, where waterways are suddenly and inexplicably clogged by enormous numbers of pig carcasses, where once-revered elders live in rural poverty and isolation — this is the stuff of nightmares. The party’s anxiety over these bad dreams can be seen in many things — in its calls for official think tanks to study carefully the “color revolutions” that toppled East European and Central Asian autocrats, and in the suggestion that party cadres read de Tocqueville’s account of the French Revolution, to ensure that China avoids the mistakes of the ancien régime.”

“We don’t distinguish among “hacking” behaviors now — everything that’s done in any way to harm, compromise, gain unauthorized access to, probe, or monitor without knowledge is considered a hack or hacking. And media outlets obligingly stretch the definition as wide as possible for short headlines and shallow stories. We don’t ask about function, motive, provenance, authority, or any other detail. Hacking is coding is doxing is theft is an intelligence operation is a malware insertion is a leak is a practical workaround. File it all over there, in the menacing box with the skull and crossbones on it.”

“As it happens, timespace as heterogeneous singularity is not unprecedented in human history: the dreamtime of the indigenous Australians in which past, present and future were held in symbiotic tension, is known as the “all-at-once-time” as opposed to the one-thing-after-the-other-time that we all became accustomed to in occidental modernity. The first synchronous electric clocks—the ones we now see on the tower-most parts of monolithic modern architectures—were introduced only in the 1920s. A synchronous electric clock has no inherent timekeeping properties, but runs at the frequency of the electrical power source, which—when coupled to an electric motor with the correct gearing—drives the clock hands at the correct time. Even time—as we know it—is virtual: a technological construct.”

“(T)he expanded use of unmanned drone missiles has been made possible by an intelligence-gathering system which the US Air Force has named Operation Gorgon Stare. It refers to a collection of surveillance and data-analysis resources that “sees” unblinkingly 24/7, indifferent to day, night, or weather, and that is lethally oblivious to the specificity of the living beings it targets.”

Wal-Mart and Amazon have become America’s main conduits for cheap, mass-produced goods from China’s factory floors. But who needs them anymore?

I am holding in my hands a men’s down jacket with fur trim, sent four days ago direct from a warehouse 67 miles west of Shanghai.

The $52.19 jacket won’t be confused for Prada. The fur appears to be “fur.” It came out of the box smelling like plastic and solvent.

What the jacket represents is far more interesting: It’s the final and direct link between China’s manufacturers and the global consumer. In the same way Chinese companies took over the production of goods, they are now increasingly capable of merchandizing those goods, using the Web and modern freight transport. Bentonville, you are being outsourced to China, too.

“The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship—have been remade into commodified or financialized forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present. In spite of all the scientific research in this area, it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.”

“It’s 4:24am and I’m in bed watching a documentary about a chimpanzee named Nim.” “It’s 2.19pm and I am pretty sure I am still drunk.” “It’s 11:51pm and all I want is an entire pumpkin pie okay.” “It’s 10:12am and THERE ARE STILL NO BISCUITS. Wtf is this anarchy!? "It’s 9:57am and kyle and I are sobbing while watching cheaper by the dozen 2.” “It’s 1:31pm and he hasn’t texted me back from last night. I give up.” “its 10:29am and i already want pizza.” “It’s 3.11am and I’m sober in Burger King. What’s happening?” “It’s 9:23am and I can’t wait to taste wines tonight!” “it’s 2:32pm and I woke up like 5 minutes ago.” “Its 2:50am and I’m still doing homework.” “It’s 11:29am and I’ve only just realised I’ve had my t-shirt on backwards the whole morning.” “It’s 3.12am and I’m cooking supernoodles. what my life.” “It’s 7:32am and I am listening to R Kelly very loudly. Where did it all go wrong?”

This is what the missile site of the previous post looks like from the road. From the blueprints, the pyramid structure is about 75 feet / 23 meters tall (the structure continues below the berm). Cold War Tourist.com offers some photos of what the complex looks like inside recently. The very bottom of the page indicates the missile site was up for sale and, remarkably, was purchased by the Spring Creek Hutterite Colony (a group with some similarities to the Mennonites), for a sum of $530,000 USD. The government was generous enough to offer to pay for the extensive environmental cleanup. Click through the source to experience the drive-by, it’s a beautiful location, with the exhaust towers contrasting with the delicate windmills.

“In addition to the original logistics system, the newly “Yi-Xin-Ou” is the first international logistics railway channel from Yiwu to Europe. On Dec. 9, “Yi-Xin-Ou” traveled for three weeks and 13,000 kilometers and arrived at Madrid. Passing through eight countries including Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and Germany, the train from Yiwu delivered this year’s Christmas gifts from China.”

“It would be difficult for any importer if their purchase cannot fill one container. Even if the sellers are OK to sell you a half-container of products, you still need to pay for the shipping cost for the half-empty container, which would drive up the cost of importers,” he says.

But in the Yiwu market, people can easily select and pick up hundreds of different products, put them in one container and ship them back to their home countries together, according to Jin.

Selling less than container loads is increasingly popular in Yiwu as importers are not confident about selling a large amount of products when their countries have been hit by an economic slowdown.

The situation actually boosts Yiwu’s business because the market sells close to 2 million different types of small commodities, says Chang Xiaolei, CEO of Master Base International E-Commerce Co Ltd, an Australian trade agent.

“The business model of Yiwu fits the demand of Australian importers very well because it is a country with a small population. Many of the importers cannot buy a container of one type of products,” says Chang, whose company has been offering trade services to Australian importers in Yiwu for 20 years.

“Across the experiences of Rosetta, Philae, Orion, Wanderers, Ambition, and Interstellar, we can start to see a reconfiguring of public expectations around space science and technology. Our understanding of space remained relatively static for the duration of the twentieth century; it was a site for exploration and the demonstration of engineering prowess, a source of wonder, a new frontier. We have always been only a few decades away from the first manned Mars mission.”

“Tsur’s larger argument is that fictional narratives affect us by delaying or disrupting “in some other manner” our cognitive processes. Moreover, our awareness of those disruptions “indicates to consciousness” that our crucial cognitive adaptations are in good shape (always welcome news).”

“In this respect, and despite its small population – a little over 2 million – and complete absence from any travel guide or tour package, Yiwu possesses a remarkable international character. More than that, Yiwu leads us to a different conception of “globalization” in today’s China. Unlike, for instance, Beijing’s Sanlitun or Shanghai’s Pudong, the Mayide area in Yiwu narrates a different tale of modernity and globalization, one maybe less known but by no means less real or important. Foreigners in Yiwu seem to prefer a shalwar kameez over a suit, and enjoy some apple-shisha tobacco rather than an imported French wine. Inside the various restaurants, televisions broadcast Bollywood movies, cricket games and news in Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, and Russian. As I, in the neon lights of the Mayide, felt often bewildered, most people seem to be feeling home. Modernity, I told myself, occurs in many different ways, and Yiwu most definitely offers a glimpse of something alternative from the version that we too often take for granted.”

“The presence of methane is significant because the gas cannot exist for long. Calculations indicate that sunlight and chemical reactions in the Martian atmosphere would break up the molecules within a few hundred years, so any methane there now must have been created recently. It could have been created by a geological process known as serpentinization, which requires both heat and liquid water. Or it could be a product of life in the form of microbes known as methanogens, which release methane as a waste product.”

On Tuesday, NASA announced that its one-ton Curiosity rover made a surprising discovery on Mars: “burps” of organic methane gas that very well may be evidence of living microbes beneath the planet’s surface.